About five years ago, for few years in a row I went to the Surrey International Writers’ Conference. I really enjoyed my time there. The energy of so many emerging and established writers coming together to share words, food and books. So this year it was a delight to find out that my poem tabula e rasa
won Honorable Mention in the 17th SIWC Poetry Contest which also gets published in their A World of Words: Writing Contest Antology (2009).

I would like to thank the judges Bernice Lever and Shelly Harrison Rae for their comments, and kc dyer (who is the SiWC Contest & Conference Coordinator) for the work she put into keeping SiWC going, and growing strong.

tabula e rasa (you can now read it here) was written a few years ago when we travelled back to Bulgaria to visit my family. As usual I am reminded of the simple pleasures in life and the importance of sitting around the table to eat. The kitchen table, whether it is inside or outside (as my grandmother used to have it in the summer), becomes the heart, hearth of being together. A space open to not only culinary discoveries and pleasures, but a kind of time warp. There is never a rush. Because everything that preceded that was to make this moment possible. Jokes, laughter, lots of laughter. At least I remember sitting for a long time at the table laughing to stories told and re-told. One may think the stories were getting perfected. But perhaps we were perfecting ourselves though the polishing of words each time they rolled off the tongue a new, against the background of so many different tastes.